Colleagues who are just fucking stupid

[a duncandisorderly]

What I don't understand is why aren't there more people like us out there in the real world......They're nice people, don't get me wrong, but they're boring AF.

I couldn't imagine being in a band with any of my immediate colleagues, & maybe only two of the hundreds of twats that work in this building. I don't know what most of them do with their days off, & frankly I don't want to. places I've worked before (including Mtv, obvs) there was no shortage of muso chat. here, one girl has guitar lessons & goes to gigs, & she's on the very brink of becoming a cat-lady. no, not catwoman, a cat-lady, with cats & piss & all that.

I have chris morris gazing out from my desktop, as a newsreader, with the caption "bloody hell" behind him. no-one here knows what the fuck it is.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I don't think my colleagues are stupid but there's one or two utter flowcharts.

[St_Eddie]

I live in a huge mill building apartment complex, and I never leave when the alarm goes off. I can simply step outside of the window and on to the street if I see a flame.

Mate.  You live on the 9th floor.

[ToneLa]

Think I'd prefer stupid to a cunt tbh

[Noonling]

What I don't understand is why aren't there more people like us out there in the real world. There's tonnes here who I would happily become pally with even if I'm not going bald didn't share their views. I just don't get it.

It's so rare that I find anyone who questions the nature of reality or social constructs and norms. They all just seem to turn up, do their job, talk about the weather and not take their lunch breaks. They're nice people, don't get me wrong, but they're boring AF.

[Ambient Sheep]

I have a colleague who persists in emailling me, saying "Can you just email Mr XYZ and tell him this?"

It kills me to not be able to respond "if you had just put his fucking email address where you put mine, it would be done already"

I presume this is done so that when/if Mr. XYZ replies, especially with any awkward queries, it's you who has to deal with him, not your colleague.  Sneaky workload avoidance.

Does your colleague have a letterbox?  If so then just buy a She-Wee and a length of tubing, job done.

Either that or crack them on the arse for a laugh.

[Ambient Sheep]

I couldn't imagine being in a band with any of my immediate colleagues, & maybe only two of the hundreds of twats that work in this building. I don't know what most of them do with their days off, & frankly I don't want to. places I've worked before (including Mtv, obvs) there was no shortage of muso chat...

It is odd how workplaces differ.

My first place was a good one: even though the product (petrol station EPOS systems) was mundane on the face of it, the building was packed full of funny interesting people, nearly all of them with a decent "hinterland", be it playing in bands, gaming, movie geeks etc.

My second one (in theory a much sexier product: broadcast TV equipment - you may have had the misfortune to use some of it) was the other extreme: full of grim automatons with the exception of one other guy, who left on the edge of a nervous breakdown about two years before I did.

Not had any luck since finding anywhere like the first one ever again.

[a duncandisorderly]

broadcast TV equipment - you may have had the misfortune to use some of it

yeah, probably. we had one of everything at viacom while Mtv europe grew big. I know several people whose sanity was toppled by the graft too.

&- we had an actual fire at Mtv once, took out the whole first floor of the building. the first but not the last time I was up for thirty-six hours.

[Lost Oliver]

Exactly! I welcome you into my arms.

[Sebastian Cobb]

This is the first place I've got on with people enough to actually want to go to the pub with them after work, or walks to kill a bit of our lunch breaks.

Unfortunately the business' interest in what we do is getting bigger (because they've realised it makes money and has some place in the future) and there's some new managers and leads in and the interference is getting unbearable.

One of them is clearly posturing, whenever you say you've done something or solved a problem they'll go out of their way to chime in with some chores they can add on the back of it¹. It's always some fancy word they'll have plucked out of project managers weekly. Sometimes it'll get added to the board and they'll forget they were the one that insisted upon it, and ask if it is necessary. I've also seen them force planning meetings into adding a workflow we don't really want to implement on top of something we want to use (in this case a realtime db we've experience with elsewhere so we don't have to poll for state) only to send a lengthy email a few days later with half the world cc'd asking 'is this the best solution? Could we use polling? Do we have to consider cost'.

I'd laugh at them if it didn't cause us chaos.

¹ This either encourages me to fix things on the sly or completely ignore them.

[Pranet]

"Can black people be gay?"

[zomgmouse]

The number of people who just sit there while the alarm goes off is alarming

[Mr. Internet]

Similarly...

[Lost Oliver]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlI7is9O9Yo

And I want the whole world to know.

[Kelvin]

I once worked with a guy who was unimaginably thick. Lovely guy, but literally no grasp - or interest in - even the most basic general knowledge. Off the top of my head, he had no idea that the pyramids were real (or where they were, obviously), and once guessed that women were pregnant for two years at a time.

All you had to do was pull a silly face or do a silly voice and he would absolutely shriek with laughter for about five minutes, though. Daft, but loveable.

[the]

Insert punchline about him being Foreign Secretary now

[RedRevolver]

I once worked with a guy who was unimaginably thick. Lovely guy, but literally no grasp - or interest in - even the most basic general knowledge. Off the top of my head, he had no idea that the pyramids were real (or where they were, obviously), and once guessed that women were pregnant for two years at a time.

All you had to do was pull a silly face or do a silly voice and he would absolutely shriek with laughter for about five minutes, though. Daft, but loveable.

Yes, but this thread is for colleagues, not patients.

[DrGreggles]

I know calling a doctor "fucking stupid" seems harsh, but you have to be a special kind of thick to not understand that the reason your computer doesn't work is that it's not fucking plugged in. Obviously it WAS once plugged in but YOU unplugged it so you could charge your phone.

Not convinced he's a doctor at all. Probably just puts 'Dr' before his name in the hope that no one notices what a cunt he is. Imagine that!

[Kane Jones]

How do you pronounce it then?

Hrrr?

It's pronounced Aitch Ar.

[An Actual Propeller]

"Is Tommy Cooper a make of jeans?"

[Blue Jam]

Similarly...

I've ranted many times before about how obnoxious I find all that Buzzfeed quiz "introvert" crap ("I find office xmas parties a bit awkward and I watch Netflix, I'm so quirky and special tee-hee!") but I think the saddest thing about it may be the sneering dismissal of other people as dumb "extroverts"/mindless sheeple/"normies". If you give people a chance you often find that they're actually more complex and clever and interesting than these people with their superiority complexes like to imagine. What's that- you'd rather go to the dentist than get your hair cut? Well, my hairdresser loves asking me about my research, and I've had some fascinating chats with random people in my favourite pub. Alright, a few weeks back I ended up in a conversation with some obnoxious rugby union rahs, but you win some you lose some...

Also I find that people who think they're dead clever and love sneering about how stupid everyone else is tend to be the dumb ones...

Colleagues, then:

It is odd how workplaces differ.

My first place was a good one: even though the product (petrol station EPOS systems) was mundane on the face of it, the building was packed full of funny interesting people, nearly all of them with a decent "hinterland", be it playing in bands, gaming, movie geeks etc.

My second one (in theory a much sexier product: broadcast TV equipment - you may have had the misfortune to use some of it) was the other extreme: full of grim automatons with the exception of one other guy, who left on the edge of a nervous breakdown about two years before I did.

Not had any luck since finding anywhere like the first one ever again.

I think the line of work is a major factor here. I met a lot of interesting people when I was working in call centres, because pretty much all of them were doing it as a stop-gap job while looking for a more long-term thing in their usual, more interesting line of work.

Now I'm back to being an academic science nerd most of my colleagues are of a similarly nerdy bent, and scientists they tend to be very sociable and chatty with lots of outside interests. Research centres always seems to have musicians about- one of my current colleagues teaches guitar to several of our other colleagues, I had a colleague who played in the Scottish National Orchestra, and one place even had a resident string quartet who would practice in the meeting room. Life scientists seem to love cooking- a lot like molecular gastronomy for obvious reasons, but the big one is baking. The Great British Bake-Off is always popular and a lot of scientists love their TV, plus sport and comedy and gaming.

With academia, the only exception has been my last job (the one that gave me anxiety), where I shared that miserable office with a clique of young PhD students who used to witter on about hair bobbles and retainers and Ed Sheeran and who thought I was "sooooooo stupid" for buying an Xbox and who generally liked to sneer that everyone but them was "soooooo stupid" (see above), while the older staff seemed unable to talk about anything other than their home improvements and their kids. I was very nervous when I started my new job, then relieved when I saw my new colleagues watching a video on his phone, asked him what it was and he replied "It's just a Twitch stream- do you know this guy called Limmy?"

[Cuellar]

One of my colleagues tried to microwave a fork!

Not in a bowl with food or anything. They just put a fork in the microwave and turned it on.

[Cuellar]

Another time right, I saw a male colleague standing in front of the open stationery cupboard punching himself in the dick

[Lost Oliver]

Another time right, I saw a male colleague standing in front of the open stationery cupboard punching himself in the dick

What I get up to on my brunch break is my business and my business alone.

[JesusAndYourBush]

One of my colleagues tried to microwave a fork!

Not in a bowl with food or anything. They just put a fork in the microwave and turned it on.

Did he do it to see the sparks?

[St_Eddie]

I once worked with a guy who was unimaginably thick. Lovely guy, but literally no grasp - or interest in - even the most basic general knowledge. Off the top of my head, he had no idea that the pyramids were real (or where they were, obviously), and once guessed that women were pregnant for two years at a time.

All you had to do was pull a silly face or do a silly voice and he would absolutely shriek with laughter for about five minutes, though. Daft, but loveable.

I'm not sure that the toddlers you looked after at the crèche count as 'work colleagues', mate.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I was very nervous when I started my new job, then relieved when I saw my new colleagues watching a video on his phone, asked him what it was and he replied "It's just a Twitch stream- do you know this guy called Limmy?"

The best boss I've ever had liked Limmy. We used to watch the Vine compilations and say 'Ho ho ho ho ho ho you can't be serious Geoff cmon' in the office. What a dream.

[Cuellar]

Did he do it to see the sparks?

Nah none of those things actually happened :(

[Blue Jam]

I once worked with a guy who was unimaginably thick. Lovely guy, but literally no grasp - or interest in - even the most basic general knowledge. Off the top of my head, he had no idea that the pyramids were real (or where they were, obviously), and once guessed that women were pregnant for two years at a time.

I once went to a work pub quiz where various researchers had set questions for The Science Round. One of the reproductive health researchers had set a multiple choice question: "Around how many times does the average woman ovulate over the course of her lifetime?" The options were something like 50, 500, 5,000 and 50,000. About 50% of us got it right...

[Cuellar]

Imagine!

_5,000?